In a mobile or wireless communications network, many mobile stations can be competing for shared resources. Shared resources can include carriers of a frequency band used in the wireless communications network. In some applications, to support increasing demands on the capacity of a wireless communications network, additional frequency bands have been added to the wireless communications network. The term “frequency band” as used here refers to and encompasses a “frequency band class.” Examples of different frequency band classes include an 800 MHz (megahertz) frequency band class (also referred to as “band class 0”) and a 1900 MHz frequency band class (also referred to as “band class 1”).
A challenge of having multiple frequency bands in a wireless communications network, such as a code-division multiple access (CDMA) 2000 network, is maintaining an even (or substantially even) distribution of mobile stations across carriers of the multiple frequency bands. Certain conventional techniques exist to distribute mobile stations that are making channel access requests across frequency bands. However, effective distribution techniques have not been provided to distribute idle state mobile stations across frequency bands. An imbalance of idle state mobile stations across multiple frequency bands can lead to certain frequency bands being overloaded with traffic of the idle state mobile stations, which can degrade performance of the wireless communications network.